A Moral Obligation

Washington (CNN) – The requirement that businesses provide their workers with health insurance or face fines – a key provision contained in President Barack Obama’s sweeping health care law – will be delayed by one year, the Treasury Department said Tuesday.

If you aren’t providing healthcare insurance for your employees, you aren’t running a sustainable business.

By enacting this law, we’ve made the decision to impose this moral obligation on employers: provide healthcare coverage for your employees. If you don’t, you must pay a fine and we will do it for you. (The more cynical- or practical-minded should see the opportunity for a de facto single-payer system here.)

Employers do have a choice, of course. They can choose to lobby for universal, single-payer healthcare coverage. Most elected not to in the last round of debate. Instead, most decided to do what economists call “externalizing costs.” They unfortunately embrace the false promise of short-term savings in exchange for long-term unsustainability and uncompetitiveness.

Until we have universal, single-payer healthcare in this country, the second-best system is to have employers foot the bill. If you, as an employer, don’t like it, maybe you should write to your Congresscritters about revisiting universal, single-payer healthcare.